IMO the starting post in this thread has a hint of not being genuine, especially since its anon. I will assume it is genuine.

I self taught myself Perl with perldoc and google. globs and OOP are the hardest parts of Perl to learn IMO. My background before Perl was some classroom VB I have no memory of anymore. I find Perl quite compact (in characters) and fast to write code compared to other languages where OOP is the rule and almost nothing can be done with less than 3 method calls in 1 statement which requires constantly referring to the manual on that language, or strict typed languages where automatic conversion in Perl, in the other language requires converting through 4 classes to convert an IO read result class obj to a printable string class obj string. Typically Perl doesn't have inheritance diagrams that were created to ensure a permanent job for its designers. Sigils and high punctuation levels make it much easier to read Perl, but unlike VB or Python, you aren't hopeless if you look at C, C++, C#, PHP, JS, or Java knowing just Perl. If you think Perl is hard, try its neutered cousin PHP, you might find it easier. I find Perl quick and easy for throw away scripting, which is most of my uses for Perl. I still use perldoc all the time/every script I write and I will probably never learn all of Perl by heart. Looking through the manual for every line of perl code you write since you forget prototypes, syntax, and function names is fine.

Either learn Perl (or any language) or not. A half assed attempt will waste your time. Whether Perl is the superior language is a religious question, not a question of fact. Post your code on PM and ask for criticism. Thats all you need to learn. Do you want to program at all?